IN ANNOUNCING his bid for the presidency Saturday from Springfield, Ill., Sen. Barack Obama hit all the right notes. He issued a generational call to arms, blasted the politics of old and offered to try to bring America together. Through it all, Obama was confident, charismatic and inspiring.

I wish I could say the same for Sen. Joe Biden, who announced what could be his own short-lived presidential bid a couple of weeks earlier.

Biden has been in the Senate for nearly 35 years, or since Obama was in grade school. He has run for president once before, in 1988. You would think he'd be much better at these endeavors. Instead, he tripped coming out of the gate with his clumsy remarks implying that Obama is one of a kind -- "the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Has this controversy been put to rest? I hope not. This is a teaching moment. There is more for Americans to learn about Biden and race and media double standards.

A few years ago, when Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi said something dumb about how the country would have been better off had Strom Thurmond been elected president on a Dixiecrat segregationist platform in 1948, the media poked at Lott for months. I did some poking myself.

Why the kid gloves for Democrats who make remarks that are arguably racist? I say, arguably, even though I don't think there is much argument that Biden's remarks were -- at some level -- an example of liberal racism. Most of the people I've heard say otherwise are members of the Washington press corps, many of whom also happen to be white. And yet they have no trouble being an arbitrator of what is, or is not, racist toward black people. What chutzpah.

Time magazine columnist Michael Kinsley assured us that "the pre-existing suspicion" about Biden is not that he is a racist, or even close, but that he is pathologically loquacious "(which) means his unintended comments about black presidential candidates deserve less weight, not more." MSNBC's Chris Matthews called the Biden flap a "tempest in a teapot" and suggested that he didn't "think Biden was saying anything more than somebody from his generation would say." And Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, appearing on MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann," insisted "nobody sees Joe Biden as a racist."

That includes Ward Connerly, the black conservative who is leading the charge to abolish state-sponsored racial and ethnic preferences through state ballot initiatives. Connerly recently met with the members of the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board -- just as the Biden/Obama controversy was going full blast. He said he has met Biden several times and that he doesn't think the senator is a racist. As someone who has made a name for himself by pushing the goal of colorblindness, Connerly is the last person you'd think would speak of racism.

The way Connerly sees it, Obama wasn't the one who was insulted. It was the entire black community.

"Sen. Biden made some very negative statements about 30-plus million black people," Connerly said. "He said, 'the first.' There have been a lot of pretty bright, pretty articulate, clean, good-looking black people throughout our history."

Nor does he think this was a particularly good moment for so-called black leaders who are so cozy with the Democratic Party that they have lost their objectivity.

"When Jesse Jackson, and others, for partisan reasons, wash away the seriousness of what (Biden) said," Connerly insisted, "they do great harm to an opportunity for us to open up that, look at it, ask why is it wrong and say: This is what's beneath a lot of problems about race in our society."

Connerly thinks it all goes back to "that tape in the back of people's minds that black people are not as smart, not as articulate, that beauty and good looks are, almost by definition, not attributable to black people because beautiful is blond and blue-eyed and all those things." For him, that's what was so wrong about what Biden said, along with "the fact that he essentially got away with it."

Did he really? It's a long time until the 2008 presidential election. Democrats have a lot of choices in presidential candidates next year. How many of them will choose Joe Biden?